There was another interesting matter arising from the post-expedition media aspect, as Al Alvarez wrote in his semi-autobiography of himself and biography of Mo, Feeding the Rat: ‘Between the rescue, and the ensuing publicity, a curious conjuring trick took place. Mo and Rowland effectively vanished from the story.’ In all the media hype Mo and Clive were hardly mentioned since Fleet Street were only interested in big names. Mo was, after all, only human, so even if he did have a distaste for publicity, he would naturally have preferred the whole story to be told. He did write a humorous article for the Alpine Journal in a typically self-deprecating and understated fashion as if to drive home his feelings. In just a few lines about his part in the retreat from the Ogre he wrote, ‘Strangely enough it was not a frightening experience and while not pleasurable, it certainly did not lack in excitement’.
Dougal, Tut and I had the north buttress of Nuptse in Nepal booked for the autumn of 1977, but with Dougal’s death, and then my two broken legs and Tut’s seriously injured thigh we abandoned our plan, having only one good leg between us. I had sent the Nepali Ministry of Tourism all the information about our epics on the Ogre including press reports with a photograph showing me in Nottingham General Hospital with both legs in plaster, hoping it would impress them enough to carry our application and the royalty payment over to 1978. The only reply I got was, ‘your request is not possible, please make every effort to carry out your obligations in future when booking peaks in Nepal’. Wonderful people, bureaucrats. We ground our teeth and rebooked for the autumn of 1978.
Tut’s leg was slow to heal – it remained stiff and very painful. He was advised by his doctors to seek treatment with the local Saddleworth physiotherapist, Mary Hall. During the following weeks his leg improved and his love life flourished thanks to meeting Mary’s daughter, Jane, with whom he has lived happily ever after.
Chris appeared on television several times a day during the winter, between programmes, informing the viewers how on the Ogre, ‘We boiled up snow and ice to make hot strong Bovril to thaw ourselves out. And how that beefy taste cheered us.’ Full-page advertisements saying the same appeared in the tabloid press ingraining Chris on the national consciousness and bringing the Ogre into the public domain.
I was to make eight visits to Pakistan altogether. After the Ogre there were four expeditions to K2, all of them fraught with difficulty and danger. On the first visit to K2 in 1978 we lost Nick Estcourt in an avalanche when trying to make a new route up the West Ridge, but that is another story to be included in a forthcoming book about K2.
The last visit I made to Pakistan was to the Latok mountains in 1990 where one of our porters tripped and fell with his expedition load into the Braldu River never to be seen again. We spent three days in Askole awaiting a police patrol to come down from the hills so we could obtain a death certificate that would help claim the insurance on behalf of the porter’s family.
During our stay we discovered that there was over fifty per cent child mortality, mainly due to diarrhoea and enteritis. The women were taking water for all domestic purposes – drinking, washing, cooking – from an intermittent stream that ran down the main lane of the village several times a day when released from irrigating the fields. The crops were nourished with animal and also human excrement so the source of this problem was not hard to identify. The cause of the main health problem was, as in Victorian Britain, polluted water. I decided I would do something about it; I was in fact quite angry that in this day and age there was such unnecessary suffering.
The village people of Askole had done so much for me in making ascents of their mountains possible, not to mention rescuing me from the Ogre, that it only seemed right to help out. There was a clear freshwater stream less than a mile away gurgling out of the hillside all year round. I made contact with the excellent Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in Skardu who eventually brought spring water by pipe buried three feet down against the winter cold to seventeen standpipes around the village. Within just a few years so many more children were reaching the age of five. The fact that I had climbed Everest and had now broken my legs on the Ogre, gave me a high enough profile to raise the $10,000 this project cost. I should say that $5,000 of this was generously donated via Jed Williams from the American Alpine Club. This was the project that gave me the confidence to react positively to requests in Nepal to put in schools, health posts and porter shelters as well as pipes for clean water. So indirectly from the drama on the Ogre, and the ensuing publicity, we were able to set up Community Action Nepal which now supports over fifty projects in Nepal.